Five IT Trends That Will Change Your Monitoring Habits

For network administrators these new methodologies can add complexity while trying to monitor a corporate network.

Virtualization has changed service delivery by enabling agility of deployment and ease of management, but it brings some of its own challenges. From a network perspective, traffic between VMs is hidden, whether inside a single host or encapsulated in an overlay network among multiple hosts. Since many modern SOA applications are spread over multiple layers and VMs, the inter-VM traffic contains valuable diagnostic and APM information.

Monitoring VM network traffic can often be done by using a mirror port on the virtual switch. While this is fine for troubleshooting scenarios, it doesn’t scale well. For larger scale environments, it’s often cost effective to use a “virtual tap,” which connects to the VM management for much greater ease of use, which translates into less effort and faster resolution.

Five IT Trends That Will Change Your Monitoring Habits

Virtualization has changed service delivery by enabling agility of deployment and ease of management, but it brings some of its own challenges. From a network perspective, traffic between VMs is hidden, whether inside a single host or encapsulated in an overlay network among multiple hosts. Since many modern SOA applications are spread over multiple layers and VMs, the inter-VM traffic contains valuable diagnostic and APM information.

Monitoring VM network traffic can often be done by using a mirror port on the virtual switch. While this is fine for troubleshooting scenarios, it doesn’t scale well. For larger scale environments, it’s often cost effective to use a “virtual tap,” which connects to the VM management for much greater ease of use, which translates into less effort and faster resolution.

IT continues to change to address needs of businesses and employees. The consumerization of IT has uncoupled users from the desktop, and virtualization and cloud have added to the agility of servers. While the attention and appreciation of our often under-recognized industry is welcomed, for network administrators these new methodologies can add complexity while trying to monitor a corporate network.

Some of the growing trends that we have seen in 2013 are BYOD, cloud migration and a continued growth in VoIP, which dives a bit into more technical territory. Accepting these trends while shifting your network monitoring strategy to accommodate them can be difficult. Jim MacLeod of WildPackets, an international provider of network monitoring tools and equipment, provides top trends in the IT industry, and how best to monitor your network while still enjoying the benefits of IT consumerization and virtualization.

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